The SaaS Growth Blog

Actionable Metrics Canvas by Inturact is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Whether you are just starting your business or working on scaling, growing your customer base is essential to the success of any SaaS business. One of the most important places to start is by tracking the SaaS metrics that matter most. The simplest and most effective model for this is called Actionable Metrics or AARRR.

You know that content is king for creating a loyal and engaged customer base. But businesses sometimes find that content marketing is just as challenging as marketing the product that the content is designed to sell.

Content marketing should seamlessly drive customers to the product or service you're selling, not become just another source of stress for your business. Simply devising a content marketing strategy isn't sufficient to get your brand off the ground. If your strategy isn't working, you're probably making one of these seven common mistakes.

You’ve already gotten your prospects aware of your product and committed to a free trial. Now it should just be a matter of time before they become paying customers, right? Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy to get trial users to convert to premium subscribers, even when they’ve been able to gain some hands-on experience with your product. Luckily, hope is not lost when it comes to getting your SaaS leads to take that leap into the premium version of your product.

It’s nearly springtime, and if you’re a gardener like I am, you might be looking into composting. I know, you’re wondering what on earth composting has to do with content marketing, much less SaaS marketing, but bear with me. A successful compost pile is a carefully constructed layered mass of dry, brown matter – dead leaves, dry lawn clippings, straw – and green waste (fruit and vegetable waste from your kitchen). If you don’t get the ratio of brown to green right, you’ll wind up with a stinking heap of garbage.

Are you seeing the connection to content marketing yet? No?

I recently did a 30-minute workshop for Forget The Funnel on creating better user onboarding that focuses highly on your customer and their desired outcome. I wanted to highlight the most important areas here.

By Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré & Trevor Hatfield

We’re in the midst of writing our SaaS Growth Playbook – a zero bullshit, actionable guide to growing SaaS businesses that are set up to scale from the start. It’s an ambitious undertaking, because so much has been written about this. Really great books like The Startup Owner’s Manual (currently highlighted and bookmarked past recognition on our desks), The Lean Startup and Lean Analytics, Value Proposition Design, and that whole “Jobs to be Done” thing? Is that a book yet? Because it seems like every founder we’ve spoken with in the last two months can’t stop talking about it.

The buyer’s journey has been around quite some time and comes in many forms. The purpose, however, remains the same. The buyer’s journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, evaluate, and purchase a new product or service. By mapping out this journey one can create clear messaging and content more specifically to the discovery stage that potential customers are searching within and ultimately drive and convert more qualified leads.

Regardless of what business you may be in, the increasingly crowded marketplace means that it’s more invaluable than ever before to find ways to distinguish your company from your competition. Thanks to modern technology, consumers are savvier than in the past and are prone to conducting detailed research regarding their purchase options.

Efficiency is a natural prerequisite for doing business. Otherwise, you run the risk of squandering your company’s precious resources, and your sales and marketing teams’ hard work may go to waste. And on top of all that, you run the risk of continuing methods of attracting customers that simply aren’t working. For a SaaS business in particular, that can be a death sentence. Having the right key performance indicators (KPIs) in place, however, can change everything for the better.

With the purchase of LinkedIn today for $26 Billion in cash, Microsoft makes its 196th acquisition. I wanted to take a look at what acquisitions were made in the past and thought it might be cool to see the background on how Microsoft got to where they are with an interactive timeline.